Installing Software Packages.

Creating a folder for X-Plane Tools.

To keep your X-Plane utility software organized, it’s best to create a dedicated folder for all related packages. If your PC has multiple drives, choose a non-operating system drive—such as your D: drive—for this folder. Even a slower, traditional hard disk is perfectly fine. You might name this folder X-Plane Tools.

Inside the X-Plane Tools folder, create the following five subfolders:

LittleNavMap
Map Enhancement
SimHeaven
swift
TeamSpeak3

These folders will house the various utility programs used alongside X-Plane. Keeping them separate from your operating system drive helps avoid interference from Windows protections and ensures smoother updates or troubleshooting.

💾 When downloading software, save each program directly into its corresponding folder.

swift Pilot Client

The swift Pilot Client is an open-source, multi-platform application that allows users of flight simulators to connect to online air traffic simulation networks. By connecting to these networks, virtual pilots can fly with or observe other human-controlled aircraft and interact with human air traffic controllers for a realistic multi-user online experience.

To install the swift Pilot Client for X-Plane 12, you will need to download and run the installer, which installs both the swift Pilot Client and the required XSwiftBus plugin for X-Plane. A key step is also to install a Common Sim Library (CSL) model set to see other aircraft on the network.

Step 1: Download swift

Go to the swift Pilot Client GitHub releases page to find the latest version.
Download the correct installer for your operating system (Windows, macOS, or Linux).
Save both files to the swift folder you have created above.

NOTE:

Always get a version marked as “Latest“, not the ones marked “Pre-release“.

Step 2: Run the installer and configuration wizard

Launch the installer you downloaded by double clicking on it.
You will see a blue warning, but ignore it by clicking on the “More info“, which will bring up another blue warning.
Click on “Run anyway“.

You will see a quick flash of the Lufthansa B747, followed by the “Setup” screen.
Press “Next” to go to the next screen and accept the agreement.

On the “Select Components” screen, select “X-Plane” as the Simulator Plugin. Press “Next“.
On the “Installation” screen, click on the ‘file browser‘ on the right.
It will open the “Select Folder” in your File Browser, navigate to the path where we made the folders earlier. Select the “swift” folder.

The correct installation path will now be displayed, Press “Next“.
On the “Ready to Install” screen, press “Next“.
You will see the “Installing” screen running a few installations, just give it time to finish.

The next screen will be the “swift configuration wizard“, again accept the license and privacy policy. Press “Next“.
On the “Data loading” screen, press “Next“.
On the “Copy models” screen, press “Next“.

The next screen will be the “Copy settings and caches from other swift versions“, press “Next“.

On the “Simulator” screen, select the X-Plane in the “Select your simulator” row.
In the next part, “Setup of each individual simulator“, select “XP” for “Simulator“, Set your path for the “Simulator directory“. Lastly, select the path for your “Model directories“.

On the “First model set” screen, under “Simulator“, choose “XP“, under “Models” set the path for the ‘Model dir.:‘. For now ignore the rest and press “Next“.

On the “Simulator specific installations” screen, set the correct paths under “Download and Install XSwiftBus“.
The “Install directory:” is your X-Plane folder
The “Download directory:” is your created folder in the ‘X-Plane Tools/swift‘ folder.
Ignore the rest and press “Next“.

Still on the “Simulator specific installations” screen, there is a line called “Version:“, that is for the ‘xwsiftbus‘. You can install it from here, just click on the “download“.

Just press “OK” for both windows.

On the “Hotkeys” screen, nothing to do here for now and press “Finish“.

Eureka!! We have installed the swift Pilot Client.
The screen you see now is called the “swift launcher” which we you will often call up. The two most important buttons at the bottom:
1. The blue GUI – the button to start the Pilot Client used for multi-player flights.
2. The green Mapping Tool for creating the model set.

Behind everything, you will notice the “Completing the swift Setup Wizard” screen floating around, just press “Finish“.

To get to the executables to run, in your File Browser go to the “X-Plane Tools/swift/bin” folder.

You will find them near the bottom of the list. You can make shortcuts for them by right clicking on the file and selecting “Pin to Start“.

Step 3: Creating a CSL Model Set

The swift client uses CSL models to display other users’ aircraft on the online network. There are a few model packages available, ranging from thousands of aircraft to a few. Here at DC-3 Airways, we have created a smaller CSL models package, it is called SwiftCSL.

Download the SwiftCSL package, created for the DC-3 Airways online flying. This package has about 74 aircraft.
Extract the SwiftCSL as a folder and place it in your main X-Plane folder, “X-Plane 12/SwiftCSL.
Start the “Mapping Tool” (green icon) and use this mapping tool to set up and manage your model set.

You may also start the “Mapping Tool” from the ‘swift Launcher‘.

Select the “Stored own models XPlane” tab at the top.
Right click anywhere in the black window, select “Simulator“, then “Force model reload” on the second window, followed by selecting “XPlane models from directory“.

Again a File Browser window will open and navigate to the “swiftCSL” folder installed earlier in the main folder of your X-Plane 12.

Your “Stored own models XPlane” tab will be filled with about 42 aircraft types.

You may see some warning messages, but just click on the red “X” to close them.

Click on any aircraft in the window, the line will turn to a bright blue highlight.
Press Ctrl + A and all lines will be selected or highlighted.
Right click anywhere on the blue and select “Model set” in the popped up window, then “Add to own Model set“.

Now select the “Active model set XPlane” and you will notice that it has also filled up with aircraft models.
IMPORTANT
At the right bottom, click on “save ‘XPlane”.
Close the Mapping Tool, your Model Set is now up to date.

End of edit up to now… info below not formatted yet….

Step 4: Connect to the DC-3 Airways flight server

Open the SwiftLauncher application and click the blue GUI icon.
In the swift GUI, click the “Connect” button.
Enter your DC-3 Airways ID and password in the appropriate fields.
Launch X-Plane 12.
Once X-Plane has fully loaded and you are in the cockpit, go back to the swift GUI and click “Connect” again. Your client should now connect to the flight simulator.

Step 5: File a flight plan

With the client connected, click the “Fl. Plan” button in the swift GUI.
Fill in your flight plan details and click “Send” to file it with the network.

Troubleshooting swift Pilot Client

Once you have set the swift Pilot Client software up, it will rarely fail on you. Most of the time, a corrupted SwiftCSL will cause most of the problems. We can categorise the failures as follows:

Not having the correct server addresses, IDs and/or passwords.
The swift Pilot Client fails to load.
The swift Pilot Client fails to connect to the multi-player FSD server.
Not able to see the other aircraft in your simulator, but only labels.
Other aircraft seems to ‘skim’ the ground.

Verifying swift Pilot Client version matching.

On X-Plane, the swift Pilot Client software consist of two installations:

The main program, installed to a location of your choice, with four executables in the “/bin” folder:
- swiftguistd.exe – the one to start for MP connections.
- swiftdata.exe – where you set up your model set.
- swiftlauncher.exe
- swiftcore.exe

In File Browser, browse to your X-Plane 12/Resources/plugins/xswiftbus folder, find the file “readme.txt” and open it in a text editor. Take note of the xswiftbus version number, 0.14.142 in the above example.

Open your swiftGUI and note the version number in the top line “swift pilot client GUI Win64 0.14.142”. the version numbers must match.

If the version number in the swiftGUI is later, then download the SAME xsiftbus.7z from the download website.

Verifying swift Pilot Client version matching.

When you do not see any aircraft, it might be one of the following problems:
- The directory reference might not be correct, not pointing to the correct X-Plane directory.
- Not pointing to the correct CSL folder.
- The xswiftbus in the \plugins not matching the swiftGUI version.
- xswiftbus missing in the plugins folder.
- PIREP Submission: Only one PIREP per flight is allowed. PIREPs must be posted within 5 days after the flight’s start date. For example, if a flight begins on October 1st, the last day to file a PIREP is October 5th.Multiplayer: If you prefer flying with others, join Multiplayer or VATSIM.

Verifying CSL Models.

To test your CSL models (and that everything is correctly installed),

Start X-Plane 12, select an outside view for your aircraft.
Run your ‘swift Pilot Client GUI’ and go “Tools”, then “Model browser”.
Confirm that you have a ‘model set’, if yes, select an aircraft in the list.
At the bottom right, select ‘display’.
You should briefly see the model displayed ahead of your aircraft in X-Plane.
If you see no model, but only a label ‘swift’, refer back to trouble shooting.

https://github.com/swift-project/pilotclient/releases

X-Plane 11

swift is compatible with OpenGL and Vulkan/Metal. X-Plane has seen significant internal changes, as a consequence you have to use specific verisons of swift to correctly display aircraft and to have an operational TCAS! Until including X-Plane 11.41 you have to use swift version 0.9.4.389. From X-Plane 11.50 download and install swift 0.9.5.x or newer.

if your BlueBell Models are being displayed inside the ground or floating above it, download and install the latest version of them, it already contains a fix for this: More information

use the 64bit version of swift

make sure xswiftbus is installed and that its version number is identical with the one of swiftGUI

traffic plugins and other pilot clients for X-Plane will interfere with xswiftbus and need to be properly deactivated or removed from the plugins folder. More info

CSL models must be installed inside the folder of X-Plane, it is advisable to avoid spaces and special characters in the file paths. More information and recommendations